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EDITOR'S PAGE
Renascence, Spring 2007 by Block, Ed Jr
IT is with particular pleasure that we at Renascence present this special issue, showcasing the second Joseph M. Schwartz Memorial Essay, Professor Ralph C. Wood's '"God May Strike You Thisaway': Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil on Affliction and Joy." This biennial, commissioned essay honors the late Dr. Schwartz, emeritus professor of English at Marquette University and past editor - for seventeen years - of Renascence. In alternate years, Renascence awards a $1,000 prize for the essay judged best from among those published in the journal during the previous two years.
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Dr. Schwartz admired the work of Professor Wood, as well as the novels of Flannery O'Connor. It is only fitting, then, that Professor Wood should deliver the lecture and that Renascence should publish it as part of our annual commemoration of Dr. Schwartz's contribution to Renascence. It is also appropriate that the essay appear in Renascence, as it is a major repository of criticism devoted to the work of Flannery O'Connor.
This issue is also special in another way. As a suitable context for the essay on Flannery O'Connor, Renascence is also publishing essays on authors who were contemporaries of O'Connor, and who, together, contributed to a particular moment in early mid-twentieth century American literary culture. J. V. Cunningham, about whom Professor Francis Fike writes, was a student of the redoubtable critic, Yvor Winters, who held forth for many years as teacher, critic, and poet at Stanford University. Cunningham's poetry - and his critical pronouncements, which echoed and amplified his mentor's ideas - formed part of the climate that was late High Modernism.
Yvor Winters called widely admired poet, Helen Pinkerton, "a master of poetic style and of her material." Discussed in John Baxter's essay, Pinkerton carries on the tradition of erudite, "plain style" poetry that Winters championed, and which is experiencing a resurgence, even as the ebbing tides of postmodernism break around us.
The final essay in this special issue is a careful scholarly study authored by a new critical voice. The subject is southern novelist Walker Percy, a writer beloved of Dr. Schwartz, and about whom he published a number of pieces. Percy was a younger contemporary of Flannery O'Connor and a novelist who acknowledged his debt to O'Connor's work.
What more is there to say? We commemorate Dr. Schwartz and his inestimable contribution to Renascence with a four-part tribute to his literary tastes and the quality of his critical judgment.
Ed Block, Jr.
Copyright Renascence Spring 2007
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